CRUEL AND UNUSUAL

“I will use our military as a last resort, and our first resort.” Thus spake Dubya—and Miller saw red.

Miller (Media Studies/NYU; The Bush Dyslexicon, not reviewed) detests Bush, and for many reasons. One is the sitting president’s refusal to speak and think clearly: “We should take especial notice,” Miller writes, “that the president cannot speak standard English when he tries to talk about American democracy.” Another is that selfsame president’s imperial hauteur: to a reporter questioning the possibility of war in Iraq, Bush snapped, “I’m the person who gets to decide, not you,” while to another—this time Bob Woodward of the Washington Post—he said, “I do not need to explain why I say things. . . . I don’t feel like I owe anybody an explanation.” Then, of course, there’s the war in Iraq, explained by a man whom Miller characterizes as an architect of modern neoconservative military strategy thus: “Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business.” With reasons thus enumerated and plentiful, Miller proceeds to say many unkind things about Dubya, some of them funny, some incisive, some not. Speaking of Bush and his veep as a Borg-like unity—Bush/Cheney—he scores points by writing of the “imperial lavishness” of the administration’s spending, which even conservatives have been complaining about. He scores more points by revealing that Bush/Cheney and minions Wolfowitz, Rumself, Perle, et al., had harbored designs on Iraq since at least 1998. And he offers a minor tour de force by contrasting Bill Clinton’s supposedly scandalous on-the-tarmac haircut at LAX with a better documented incident in which a Bush White House party of September 5, 2001, ended with the discharge of several hundred fireworks late at night and unannounced to the neighbors.

It adds up to a nicely juicy rant—but not much more—some of the details of which may come as news to some readers.